Who would you ring if, at half past three in the morning, you found yourself locked in a flat by ‘bad people’ who were demanding five thousand pounds for your release? Your mum, maybe? Or your partner? Or a trusted friend of many years? Or would you – if you found yourself in such a spot of utterly baffling peril – ring a 78-year-old former employee?
In the greater scheme of things, Mark Menzies’s plight isn’t that big of a deal. Britain has a long, proud history of returning to Parliament eccentrics with rackety private lives. And unlike, say, Jeremy Thorpe or John Profumo, Mark Menzies is an MP of vanishingly little importance. He held neither power nor office at the time of his early morning imprisonment. He held only the whip. And that is gone now too.
But no man is an island and Mark Menzies is not, of course, that atypical. He is a Tory MP from Lancashire. One of his neighbouring MPs, Scott Benton, was forced to resign his seat after being filmed boasting of his corruptibility and offering to leak confidential documents for the commercial benefit of a fictitious gambling company. Another of Menzies’s neighbours, Paul Maynard, is currently under investigation for the alleged misuse of parliamentary funding for political activities.
We have had, in this Parliament, multiple accusations of sexual assault and misbehaviour against serving MPs; an MP who had to resign for watching pornography in the chamber; cabinet members forced to resign over bullying; an MP who repeatedly exposed himself to his staff; an MP found to have lobbied colleagues for money – the thing about this list is that it isn’t even attempting to be exhaustive.